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“Mongers, buyers,cheese lovers I would like to encourage you to check out Good Shepherd cheese. Good Shepherd is a sheep dairy just outside of Lexington,KY. Sanford Dotson is the owner and maker. Sanford suffered a heart attack last week and had to have open heart surgery. His son is currently making the cheese. They need to move some cheese to help pay for medical bills. This is in my opinion some of the best aged sheep cheese being made in the US. His signature cheese is called Pyrenees. As the name would suggest it is a Classic Pyrenees style cheese. They were recently featured in the Culture magazine pairings issue. Paired with of course bourbon. He is asking you pay for orders up front so they can take care of some of those medical bills. Just buy one wheel and try it. I promise you will want more.”

I don’t think of cheese and country music as an obvious link; one rarely hears a country song about dairy farming and/or cheesemaking even as “cowboys” are a staple. I do not have the breadth of knowledge with that genre that I do with punk, but I would bet – if we include references to Reagan Cheese – that there are more punk songs about cheese, than country ones. There are certainly more hip hop songs about “Cheddar”.

So, I didn’t expect my profession to overlap with the crowd too much at the Greek Theater last week when we went to go see Willie Nelson. Because of the people two rows in front of us taking up a lot of space, the two seats in front of us were not taken until the awesome opening band Shovels and Rope* had already started. What did the folks do first? Take out their Cheese Plus picnic of Challerhocker, Sofia,** and a blue and a brie that I could not identify from my angle. I almost started a cheese conversation with them but they had annoyed the people sitting next to us who we had already bonded with so I left it alone. Hey, it’s the first Saturday night I had off in months.

Later, it was time to go to the bathroom and who was in line with me? A dude in a Willow Maid hat! I asked him if he worked for Rumiano and he said no but that he had grown up with Rumianos. I would have gotten more information but it was my turn to pee and a urinal line can turn from surly to violent in a moment’s notice. ***

Let me add – for the sake of the truth — that the most common food I saw at the evening’s show was the nasty pump cheese nachos being sold to very stoned concert-goers.

All this leads me to ask, where are the country music cheese songs? Clearly, there is overlap and interest. I suppose twice a day milkings do not fit in with the outlaw genre, since there’s not a lot of time in a dairy farmer’s day to drink whisky, fight, or run from the law. But, there’s plenty of pathos in low commodity milk prices, mastitis, and, say, bad starter culture ruining a whole batch of cheese. C’mon Nashville, get with it.

Willie Nelson was just as awesome as expected, btw.

*Shovels and Rope = awesome:

**Could have been Lake’s Edge, but I don’t think Cheese Plus has that cheese. It definitely wasn’t Humboldt Fog unless the folks cut off the rinds.

A cheese company recently had some badly printed barcodes that wouldn’t scan at our registers despite being on file. It reminded me of the days when we had to price gun every product which, in turn, reminded me of a scene from one of my favorite movies. This is why POS systems are crucial.

It matters to me what Joe Strummer would have thought and I don’t think he would have approved.

3. The worst thing about that is that – except for the chorus my Comte song makes no sense. Why would the cops be chasing the Comte man? It is not like the internally coherent, “Buffalo Taleggio/Dreadlocked bison/Refrigerate on arrival/Refrigerate for survival” version of the Bob Marley classic I sing whenever we get Quadrello di Bufala in.

4. As for the current controversy regarding the EU wanting to reclaim cheese names, these three articles sum things up well:

But I would add that the people hurt most by this would be the largest US cheese companies. Most small-scale producers figured out long ago that naming your cheese after the European was a fool’s game (with some exceptions like Mozzarella. Cheddar is especially a joke in this case because they way that Cheddar is made in the US was invented in the US.). If Kraft comes out in favor of small producer issues — like making sure raw milk cheese can stay legal at 60 days aged — I would feel a lot more strongly on this issue.

Hi Everyone. I was up in Oregon on vacation with the family so I have not been around the internet lately. I had a great cheese trip planned — visiting Briar Rose Creamery on the first day of the year that they were getting goat milk — but snow prevented me from leaving the coast. Instead, I went to visit Tillamook which, though a lot less fun, was probably more useful for the book I am writing.

Look! Factory Cheddar:

167,000lbs of cheese a day is no joke. We sell about 4000-5000lbs of Tilly a year. At most cheese facilities we carry, buying that much cheese a year would get me a private tour. Here, I was up in the viewing section with the consumers ;):

It is worth noting that the two national brands of Cheddar that are thought of as “better quality” amongst consumers — Tillamook and Cabot — are both co-ops.

Look! I’m a Tillamook farmer!

I am not, however, a Blue Heron Donkey.

I visited this cheese company a couple of blocks from the Tilly factory. Causing me to laugh out loud — since i had just bought a lb of fresh curds from the Tilly factory — they were carrying Henning’s cheese curds all the way from Wisconsin! (I mean, they are better, but still…) I didn’t buy any cheese there but I bought some good chocolate truffles.